SUMMER

11

SOMEONE THE SIZE OF GOD

CASH STILLWATER LOOKS UP FROM his work and sees a splash of white birds like water thrown at the sky. They stay up there diving in circles through the long evening light, changing shape all together as they fly narrow-bodied against the sun and then wheel away, turning their bright triangular backs.

Cash had only glanced up to rest his eyes but there were the birds, shining outside his window. His eyes fill with tears he can’t understand as he follows their northward path to the dark backdrop of the Tetons, then back again to some place he can’t see behind the Jackson Hole fire station. They make their circle again and again, flaunting their animal joy.

He counts the birds without knowing it, sorting the shifting group into rows of odd and even, like beads. In the daytime Cash works at a health-food store putting tourists’ slender purchases into paper bags, but in the evenings he makes bead jewelry. His lady friend Rose Levesque, who works at the Cheyenne Trading Post, takes in the things he’s made, pretending to the owner that she did it herself. Cash learned beadwork without really knowing it, simply because his mother and sisters, and then his daughters, were doing it at the kitchen table all his life.

Before his wife died and the family went to pieces and he drove his truck to Wyoming, he raised up two girls on the Cherokee Nation. He never imagined after they were grown he would have to do another delicate thing with his hands, this time to pay the rent. But since he started putting beads on his needle each night, his eye never stops counting rows: pine trees on the mountain-sides, boards in a fence, kernels on the ear of corn as he drops it into the kettle. He can’t stop the habit, it satisfies the ache in the back of his brain, as if it might fill in his life’s terrible gaps. His mind is lining things up, making jewelry for someone the size of God.

Rose walks in his door without knocking and announces loudly, “Nineteen silver quills down the hatch, did I tell you?”

She plumps herself down at his kitchen table.

“Down whose hatch?” Cash wants to know, watching his needle. The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air. He wonders if you get used to waking up old.

“Willie Levesque’s big old, ugly, hungover hatch, that’s whose.” Rose lights a cigarette and drags on it with an inward sigh. Willie is Rose’s oldest boy, who is half her age, nineteen, and twice as big. “I had them in an aspirin bottle in the kitchen. In the kitchen, for God’s sake, it’s not like they were in the medicine cabinet.”

Cash glances at Rose, who is peevishly brushing ash off her blouse. Because she is shorter and heavier than she feels she ought to be, she clacks through her entire life in scuffed high heels, worn with tight jeans and shiny blouses buttoned a little too low. You can tell at thirty paces she’s trying too hard.

“Didn’t he look what he was taking?” he asks her.

“No. He said they went down funny, though. Like fillings.”

Cash works his needle and Rose smokes inside another comma of silence, then says, “The silver ones, wouldn’t you know. Twenty dollars’ worth. I’m about ready to take it out of his hide. Why couldn’t he have eat up some fake turquoise?”

Rose brings Cash the supplies for making jewelry, pretending she is taking them home herself, but her boss, Mr. Crittenden, holds her accountable for every bead. In the morning he puts on his jeweler’s glasses and counts the beads in every piece she’s brought in, to make sure they’re all there. It must be hard work, this business of mistrust.

“Those quills ought to pass on through without much trouble,” he tells Rose. “My girls used to swallow pennies and all kinds of things, you’d be surprised. They always turned up. You could tell Willie to give them back when he’s done.”

“Maybe l'11 do that,” Rose says. “Hand them over to Mr. Crittenden in a little paper sack.” Cash can tell she is smiling; he knows Rose’s voice, its plump amusement and thinned-out resentments, because so often he is looking at something else while she speaks to him.

He met her, or rather saw her first, in the window of the Trading Post. He made a habit of pecking on the glass and winking at her each day on his way to work, which apparently won her heart, since she says she feels like a plastic dummy up there on display. Mr. Crittenden makes her sit at a little antique schoolroom desk in the bay window storefront, where tourists can behold a genuine Indian hunched over her beadwork, squinting in the bad glare.